On Nov 26, 2003, at 06:15, Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
I fully agree the deactivation of external pictures for articles, but it was very useful especially for talk pages to show a picture and discuss it. The fact only local pictures can be rendering stimulate people to copy non encyclopaedic pictures on the servers. This is a problem for me.
If you don't reactivate external pictures, please give the reason.
Well, I'll just point out that you can _link_ to a picture just fine. People can click the link and look at it, so I don't think it really harms _discussion_.
On the other hand, we do end up with people uploading pictures of their cats/buddies/etc to stick on their user pages, which clutters things up. On the other other hand, many people don't have (or don't know how to use) a web-accessible space where they can upload pictures and then link to them, and they'd likely continue using the wiki's upload space for this stuff.
Enabling external pictures pose the slight privacy risk of exposing people to 'web bugs' so an external site can track which IP addresses have visited a certain page, though perhaps this is minor.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)